The Portable MLIS edited by Ken Haycock and Brooke Sheldon was the main textbook for my Information and Society course. It is a collection of essays oThe Portable MLIS edited by Ken Haycock and Brooke Sheldon was the main textbook for my Information and Society course. It is a collection of essays on different aspects of librarianship and policies and laws that affect libraries and librarians.

Each week we had to read an essay or two and post an answer to a question posed by our professor. Later in the week we would then have to respond to two other posts by fellow students. All of that extra writing and thinking about that book has left me feeling split-brained between enjoyment and exhaustion.

Let me explain. The individual essays are by themselves academic papers full of tips, insights, research and generally useful stuff. But the constant need to analyze the essays and respond to others' analyses has left me burned out. I need to let the book sit on my shelf of textbooks until I am ready to re-read the most interesting essays without the stress of a grade hanging over my head....more

Information Seeking in Electronic Environments by Gary Marchionini was published the year I first started grad school. It was a time when the internetInformation Seeking in Electronic Environments by Gary Marchionini was published the year I first started grad school. It was a time when the internet was still relatively new and Google was still a graduate student project. The book covers ways of finding information with the aid of computers and was a supplemental textbook for my Information and Society course.

Although the specific programs and screenshots used as examples in Information Seeking in Electronic Environments are out of date (and in many cases, nonexistent), the methodology behind those programs is still in use in modern day programs. I suspect the methods will continue to be useful even as future generations of programs and services are created.

The book covers topics like browsing versus searching, the reasons behind information seeking, the process of finding information, mechanisms to aid searching and the continuing evolution of information seeking. These are all topics we covered in both of my classes this semester and continue to be topics of interest in library science.

Pages 124-37 of the "Why Browse" gives the best snap shot of where internet technology was in 1995. Of especial interest to me is Figure 6-11 on page 137 is a Semantic map display of files searched on a computer. Boxes are drawn around the different topics and the larger boxes represent the topics of most interest. In other words, it's an early version of a tag cloud, something that is being used more and more in Web 2.0 applications.

So while the book was supplemental reading and has out of date screenshots, it's still a fascinating and useful reference book that I plan to hold on to....more

The Googlization of Everything by Siva Vaidhyanathan looks at Google history and it's growing reach of services across the internet. The thesis is thaThe Googlization of Everything by Siva Vaidhyanathan looks at Google history and it's growing reach of services across the internet. The thesis is that Google is striving to control the world's access to the internet to harvest as much marketable data as possible.

Right off the bat, though, Vaidhyanathan approaches the different pieces of Google's services with a clear anti-Google agenda. With such negativity regardless of the evidence presented, it's hard to take any of his observations seriously.

The book first outlines the different services Google offers and how it uses the data it collects both through its robots and through user interaction. These observations, though, are done as an outsider — as a user of Google — without an effort to get Google to respond to perceived abuses. I suppose I am spoiled by the Google articles written by Barbara Quint.

The most interesting section is the examination of search usage by languages spoken. Google's saturation as a search index is highest in multi-lingual countries and amongst multi-language speakers. Google's flexibility of search in multiple and simultaneous languages makes it an invaluable tool.

The take away messages of The Googlization of Everything is that Google isn't as all present as the title implies. It does have its adopters — namely in multi-lingual countries like India, but it's not the world dominant behemoth you might think. ...more